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» We sell computer hardware, and need to log customer technical issues. We have been debating whether to use Service Tickets, Service Order, Complaints Management or Cases. Could you explain what each of these are and when they might be used?

1)Service Ticket Management
The service ticket is the most common type of service-related business transaction.
Service tickets are commonly used as the default transaction for logging product defects, bugs, or any other technical issues.
After creating a service ticket as a follow-up transaction to the interaction record, agents can perform technical analysis of problems (using multi-level categorization) and provide solutions within defined service-level agreements (SLAs). If necessary, agents can also dispatch or escalate service tickets to second-level support using pre-defined business rules.
2)Service Order Management
Service orders are very similar to service tickets (in fact they share the same underlying technical structure) but are used whenever it is necessary to schedule a repair, installation, or other field-service related appointment -- especially if spare parts/service parts are required.
Unlike service tickets, which do not support spare parts/service parts, the service order allows agents to assign the relevant spare parts/service parts required for a repair, maintenance or installation.

3)Complaint Management
Complaints are a very specific type of service transaction. In SAP CRM, complaints are created as follow-up documents to support product returns, exchanges, or refunds. A complaint is appropriate when a customer has a problem or issue with delivery shipment or billing invoice.
Agents can create a complaint from a reference document such as sales order or billing invoice. Agents can also generate appropriate follow-on tasks such as credit/debit memos, QM notifications, free-of-charge shipments, and returns.
In SAP, complaints are NOT used to record situations in which a customer is calling to "complain" about bad service or defective products; rather interaction records and service tickets are best suited for such situations.

4) Case Management
Cases are also a very specific type of service transaction.
In SAP CRM, cases are created as follow-up documents to group together multiple documents or objects related to a single root cause or issue.
For example, a company might create a case for keeping track of all of the service tickets related to a particular product recall, service outage, insurance claim, criminal investigation, etc. Cases are not created to log individual customer issues or problems; rather service tickets are typically used for such situations.